The key to a strong downtown lies in smart policy changes, not big projects

By Tiffany Owens Reed

The weather is getting warmer here in Texas, which makes it a great time to spend time by the river. The riverfront that connects Cameron Park, East Waco, downtown, and Baylor University is hands down one of the city’s most beautiful amenities. When I lived in Sanger Heights (a historic neighborhood not far from downtown), one of my favorite weekend pastimes was biking down to the river, crossing the bridges, and back, or heading downtown for a cold beer or iced matcha.

The waterfront has a long and interesting history. If you look at old depictions of the city, you’ll see the city emerging along its shores. After a series of floods, urban renewal projects, and the tragic tornado of 1953, these organic neighborhoods were replaced by a convention center, hotels, and restaurants—the kind of plans you might see in standard downtown master plans.

It seems that the planned approach to downtown revitalization is back in fashion. “Master Developer Sought for Waco’s Grand Downtown Vision,” ran a headline last fall. The council has since adopted renderings provided by California architectural firm Gensler, a plan that includes, among other things, demolishing the current convention center and building a new city hall and a new stadium for a yet-to-be-named minor league baseball team.

Contracts with Hunt Development Group were signed earlier this year. With this new plan, the city appears poised to embrace a strategy similar to what we’ve seen in countless other downtowns: a focus on big, top-down, state-run projects that, in my conversations with other Waco residents, left many of us wondering: “A new convention center? A baseball stadium?”

The urban planning approach is understandable. Like most American downtowns, Waco is in constant competition with surrounding suburbs for residents and shoppers, always trying to figure out how to make its downtown an attractive place for residents to live. In this context, it might seem that master plans, combined with various incentives and an emphasis on entertainment, are the only way to attract developers and shoppers to the city’s core.

But relying on a planned approach and “grand projects” to revitalize the city is a risky approach. Rather than increasing the city’s wealth, these grand projects often require significant public investment and incentives, putting cities in the risky financial position of making big, expensive bets in the present with the hope of recouping that money later.

Moreover, these plans require cities to commit to a future whose cost-effectiveness, relevance, or resilience they cannot assess. It is simply impossible to know whether these plans will achieve their intended goals, and their broad, centralized nature makes it difficult to adapt to changing market conditions or changes in regulation and funding.

The good news is that cities have alternatives. Rather than opting for big projects that jeopardize their long-term financial health and adaptability, public leaders can instead opt for a series of policy changes that require much less money, preserve their adaptability, and have the potential to trigger a positive cycle of wealth creation.

For example, in November, Detroiters will have the option to adopt the property tax, a tax approach that taxes land more than property. This measure essentially punishes land speculation, incentivizing landowners and owners of blighted properties to use their assets productively and reducing the tax burden on property owners. It’s an example of a policy change that doesn’t require massive infusions of public money and can actually generate more productive uses and new revenue for a city without increasing the city’s overall liabilities.

Reduced-rate parking zones are another example of how land can be used more productively, while generating a revenue stream for the surrounding community and (more importantly) without increasing costs. In Austin, Texas, for example, a reduced-rate parking zone in the West University neighborhood generated $150,000 in its first year, which led to a 10 percent increase in sales tax and more investment in sidewalk infrastructure.

Cities can also use their power and influence to take a more human-centered approach to connecting infrastructure in city centers, selecting a variety of low-cost land-use and road design practices that improve their safety and overall attractiveness, making city centers more appealing to pedestrians, rather than drivers. Other policies could simplify the process for entrepreneurs to open businesses or even (more ambitiously) allow small-scale manufacturing to return to the city core.

This type of decision marks a sharp break from the status quo in downtown development. The “Go Big or Go Home” model of thinking assumes that the only way to make downtowns attractive is to attract private investment through millions of dollars of public money, as well as long-term tax breaks and maintenance fees.

In reality, what we need are more practical policies, based on a realistic understanding of what makes city centres attractive to people: continuity of the built environment (rather than the gaps we see when too much land is given over to parking), safety, beauty, housing options and convenient businesses.

But this approach requires courage. It requires leaders willing to accept that their job is not to impose a particular outcome for the downtown, but rather to cultivate the kind of environment that allows a meaningful downtown to emerge gradually over time through the contributions of many actors who are free to make many small bets. It requires a willingness to forgo the sexy performances and political euphoria of a grand opening in front of a new stadium, and instead embrace the wise but unpredictable nature of the incremental approach.

This is how all the iconic cities we love were born: they were built not to completion by a central planner, but by many small hands, incrementally, over time. Cities cannot fully replicate the environment that fostered this kind of outcome, but we can strive to adopt policies that embody the same philosophy.

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This article was previously published on STRONGTOWNS.ORG and is republished under a Creative Commons license.

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